The United Kingdom has appointed a Minister of Loneliness, according to several news reports this month.

In announcing the appointment, British Prime Minister Theresa May said

I want to confront this challenge for our society and for all of us to take action to address the loneliness endured by the elderly, by carers, by those who have lost loved ones — people who have no one to talk to or share their thoughts and experiences with,

As more people live longer than ever, loneliness is compounded by physical infirmities that make social interactions difficult.

As a doctor, I consider loneliness a genuine risk to good health, even if the title of said minister reminded me of Monty Python’s famed “Ministry of Silly Walks.” (Apparently, I was not alone in this thought.)

The announcement of the proposed takeover of Aetna (a health insurer) by CVS (a drugstore chain calling itself a “pharmacy innovation company”) has become a big news story. What does it mean for U.S. health care? More importantly, how will it impact us as individual patients (what some like to call “customers”)?

I don’t know.

I’m not sure anyone has clarity on this yet. We’ll have to wait and see if the deal goes through, and then how the behemoth merged company brings efficiency or monopolistic pricing to the market.

Mercy Virtual, which opened in 2015, calls itself “the world’s first and only facility of its kind.” The 125,000 sq. foot building houses health professionals who remotely monitor and consult for dozens of hospitals and ICUs. It’s all done telephonically, er, remotely, errr, virtually.

[Another article in that same Politico issue makes the case against hospital beds, on the basis of bed rest being counterproductive for nearly every medical condition we treat. I used to get frustrated watching people ‘decondition’ while laying around in bed. It’s a serious problem, especially in the elderly.]

Which leads directly to another future question: is the age of the virtualist upon us? Yes, as predicted in a recent JAMA column by Dr. Michael Nochomovitz, who makes the case for a medical specialty devoted to care of patients through technology.

It may be the way of the future, but it sure makes performing physical exams harder.

A thousand or more cups of urine arrive most nights by express mail to Comprehensive Pain Specialists clinics. The samples are tested for narcotics and other drugs, both legal and illegal. (Heidi de Marco/KHN)

In a beautifully reported investigative piece, Fred Schulte and Elizabeth Lucas of Kaiser Health News detail the explosive growth of the urine drug testing industry in the U.S.

We’ve written about this once before (more than 4 years ago!), but the growth of the industry fueled by taxpayer dollars (Medicare payment for drug testing) appears to be continuing unabated.

In this new piece, Schulte and Lucas do an expose on an outfit called Comprehensive Pain Specialists, a physician-owned outpatient pain management practice with 54 clinics across 10 states in the southeast U.S.

Let me be clear that CPS is not being singled out for malfeasance — rather, the point of the article is that they are emblematic of a huge surge in Medicare spending for expensive urine drug tests — many of which may be unnecessary.

Ay, there’s the rub. From the piece:

…there are virtually no national standards regarding who gets tested, for which drugs and how often. Medicare has spent tens of millions of dollars on tests to detect drugs that presented minimal abuse danger for most patients, according to arguments made by government lawyers in court cases that challenge the standing orders to test patients for drugs. Payments have surged for urine tests for street drugs such as cocaine, PCP and ecstasy, which seldom have been detected in tests done on pain patients. In fact, court records show some of those tests showed up positive just 1 percent of the time.

The other thing that has government watchdogs and other observers worried is that for many pain specialists, the lion’s share of their revenue is earned by these drug tests. Remember, reasons to order these tests are twofold:

Make sure patients ARE taking the drugs that you are prescribing (therefore suggesting that said drugs are not being diverted–e.g. sold on the street).

Make sure patients AREN’T taking drugs of abuse (which for many pain clinics is a violation of the clinic-patient ‘pain management contract’).

As one government attorney was quoted:

“We’re focused on the fact that many physicians are making more money on testing than treating patients,” said Jason Mehta, an assistant U.S. attorney in Jacksonville, Fla. “It is troubling to see providers test everyone for every class of drugs every time they come in.”

The excellent bar graph attached below is included with the KHN story– and clearly demonstrates the trend. What are your thoughts?

Twitter is in the news frequently these days, because it’s a primary source of presidential communication. I like Twitter because I follow various health care practitioners and pundits and they often link to interesting articles.

I came across a link to an article (blog post, really) from Martin Samuels, Chair of Neurology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and a Professor at Harvard Medical School. The whole post is worth a read if you’re interested in the evolution of American medical education over the 20th and 21st centuries. [The post originally appeared on The Health Care Blog.]

What really stood out to me was a long paragraph of his culled from phrases he’d overheard in various meetings with hospital leaders and business types.

Certain overtones of, well……jargon to say the least.

[I’ve broken the looong paragraph up for you for ease of reading. – ed.]

I’m afraid that if we don’t drill down on our brand equity on the front end, we’ll have to model it out on the back end to align our seemless incentives or pad our ask regarding the co-branding deliverables on the horizon. As an FYI, this empowerment is going to require an elbow to elbow champion getting under the covers for a 360 of the eRoom to facilitate a paradigm shift in order to achieve buy-in among the stakeholders if we’re going to tip our toe into that water and get the low hanging fruit before our clients incentivize the burning platform with new metrics.

After all, you are the process owner who needs to reach out in the proper bandwidth to push back on the KOL’s or we’ll have to sunset your blue ribbon committee for not trimming the fat on the real-time escalation project. We need to do more due diligence before we hitch our wagon to that indexed outcome measure, and let’s be careful how we message it and roll it out to the core constituency. We can model that projected gap, but we don’t want to get out ahead of our audience before sensitizing them to the moving target.

Let’s not drop the meat in the dirt but rather vet a pause point, collapse it up to a high level statement and assess the current state in order to connect the dots to achieve the ideal state and have you weigh in at the portal for service oriented architecture. After all, at the end of the day, we’ll have more skin in the game and be in a better space if you walk the stakeholders though it so that they can leverage their halo to birddog that from 10,000 feet.

If you could create a placeholder to move the needle in the continuous quality improvement initiative, some heavy lifting might give us a report card so that there can be the accountability for a decent ROI, unless the co-branding produces a choke point so severe that the balanced score card causes a culture change, one by each. Just between you and I, you need to parking lot that issue, take the deep dive and put the rubber to the road with a degree of commonality that will re-engineer a sea change in our SWOT analysis so that we bake it into the budget of the high level implementation group. We have to move the ball down the field and prevent leakage. Net-net there is value added for a win-win, rather than a zero-sum game.

You can manage the matrixed organization on the frontline and in the back office. With central discipline and local control we can achieve savings and margin, while penetrating that segment of the market. A lot of what we have to do to reduce our trend is blocking and tackling in different spaces. Bottom line on top, if I don’t report to myself, we could really take a haircut before we can trim the fat out of the box and shift the culture beyond this pilot demonstration program. That having been said, the PEST analysis shows that if you step up to the plate and evangelize the brand, we can be about the business of creating a placeholder of new buckets with more vertical silos so that we can finally tell whether we are on foot or on horseback.

Comparing apples to apples, it is clear that this is not a plug and play culture, so that you’ll have to hold your nose and jump in order to filter the noise and incentivize the process owners in a more granular fashion before it becomes a major mission drag. A bread crumb has been forming so let’s put some stakes in the ground to leverage our insights as enablers of change to circle back on a more granular view, and tee up our clinical levers to mine insights from the benchmarks and beat the waste out of this process. We will cleanse our application platform and get ready for the first wave of ambulatory e-care care go-live across the family and take advantage of the elbow-to-elbow support of the super-users and be back to 100 percent productivity by the second week.

Having said that, we traffic-lighted that report so you can optimize the outcome metrics. If we can get the whole group on board in this arena we can try to boil the ocean with a six sigma culture change. We mean to hit this one out of the park and get some substantive returns in the coin of our realm to avoid any mission creep. It’s a non-starter to analyze the dashboard for crosswalking noise, so we need to slice and dice our organic growth, peel the onion and hardwire the initiative with more boots on the ground. If this could be the pause point for a new value initiative, that’s where the metal meets the road.

Let’s reach out, using our optimized tool kit to go anything north of zero and put a hard stop on this turn-key operation. If you would like to get some trend lines and traction from this piece, I can ping you a copy of my deck.